Building mobile first applications

Building mobile-first applications have become an important part of web development in today's world. The requirement of all the companies has now inclined towards building mobile-first applications. Recently my company also started moving towards building mobile-first applications. We initially had an application that worked only on the web. It had problems even when viewed on little small-screen laptops. Now that the business demands applications that work both on mobile as well as desktop applications, it is mandatory thing to build applications that are mobile-first.

What is the mobile-first application?

Mobile-first applications are applications that are fully compatible with mobile browsers. Basically, all the tasks that are capable of doing on a desktop browser should be available on the mobile browser as well. The main thing here is the flexibility to switch between the different sizes of screen. I would like to show some examples of how mobile-first applications are built. There are two images below where the first one is for the desktop and the second one is for the mobile device.

The first image is for the desktop application and the second image is for the mobile application. We will be able to see the transformation there. The social icons go down making it viewable or readable on the mobile device but on a desktop device it can be on a wide mode that looks good.

People are focusing on these types of aspects at the UX level when building mobile-first applications. The demand for UX designers plays a vital role in these things. In modern design, people prefer mobile-first applications more than the legacy view of the application and that is the primary reason why people switch from older web pages to fresh and new web pages. For the company I work for, there is an exclusive team working on the UX part alone. They make the designs and then a developer would pick that design and code it. This happens for all the components and all those components are made for both mobile as well as desktop applications.

How easy is it to build mobile-first applications?

Building a mobile-first application from scratch is easier compared to transforming an existing web application into a mobile-first application. There are some frameworks and libraries out there that make the web development task easier. For example, Bootstrap is a framework that can be used effectively to build mobile-friendly applications. Based on the size of the window bootstrap is capable of adjusting the components inside the web page. It is also easy to use as the components come with inbuilt adjusting capabilities making the task easier for the developers.

It is also fun to build such applications. Modern web frameworks provide us with enough tools that are sufficient to build mobile-first applications. Especially when we pick a good library or framework, they would have inbuilt components that are mobile-friendly by default. Bootstrap, Quasar, Tailwind, etc are some examples of such frameworks/libraries.

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Posted with STEMGeeks